Every year around this time, I do a simple piece summarizing all the provincial budgets. I usually wait until all ten are done – so y’all get the full national picture – but unfortunately that’s not possible this year because neither PEI nor Alberta, both of whom quite recently acquired new administrations, are planning on getting budgets out the door before I break for the summer. So, I figured I may as well get the whole thing – or 8
Yesterday, I explained how the distribution of funds might occur in a single-envelope PBF system (that is, the dominant system in North America, where indicators generate scores for each institution which then govern the distribution of a pre-set amount of money). And while that is the likely way a PBF system will work in Ontario, it’s not the only possible way and indeed the government has left some hints that it is thinking about an alternative method. The way the
Judging from various commentary I’ve seen/heard over the last few days, I suspect we’re all about to hear quite a lot of nonsense about Ontario’s proposed new Performance-based Funding (PBF) system. Some of this is a natural consequence of the Conservatives announcing a general policy without announcing any details, which allows people’s imaginations to run rampant (and where Conservatives and higher education are concerned, academics’ imaginations can get pretty wild). So, let’s just go through a few basics about PBF
Morning all. Yesterday at Queen’s Park, Finance Minister Vic Fedeli brought in the Ontario Conservatives’ first budget of their new mandate. There were cuts of various sorts, particularly in social services, but in many ways it was gentler than people expected: the plan involves getting the budget to balance in five years, which frankly is what the Liberals probably would have done anyway (though they wouldn’t have got there exclusively by reducing the spend side). It’s not even a strict
If you recall, way back in the middle of March, there was a federal budget (see our analysis here). And as increasingly seems to be the case with Liberal budgets these days, there were a lot of unknowns. Stuff that hadn’t been thought through. Announcements on vague generalities with no actual policies behind them. (At the beginning of the Trudeau era, someone said “these people from Queen’s Park are used to running a government with six people; you can run
One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.
